Thread: Defend our citizens - America would

Am I misreading this article?
Are they praising us or taking us for TOTALLY DUMB ASS IDIOTS?
I'm reading it like all of us Americans just got insulted all to hell and back.
Do I need to go back to bed and get up again and re-read this article?

Defend our citizens - America would
By Ben Fenton
(Filed: 12/07/2006)
On the final day of my three-year posting in Washington, as the family headed for Dulles airport and home, I could not get these words out of my mind: he's a US citizen.
"He" was my three-month-old son, dozing in my wife's arms as we purred along the blissfully empty road dedicated solely to airport traffic. And indeed he was, and is, a US citizen as well as a Brit. Born in Washington's functionally comfortable Sibley Memorial Hospital, Julius now has two passports, one coloured US blue, one EU red. Now. But then, my growing anxiety as Dulles came closer was that he had only the red one.
We had not thought to get him an American passport yet. With all the palaver of packing up our much-loved home of three years and coming back to Britain, it wasn't high on the list of priorities. When you think about immigration and nationality matters, the place you are going to is surely the bother, not the place you are leaving.
But two nights before we left America, a friend jokingly told me the story of a BBC correspondent who had also bred a little Anglo-Yank in Washington. Arriving at the airport for their departure at the end of his posting, the immigration officer had looked at the baby's British passport.
"He was born in Washington?" the immigration officer had asked. "Yes, that's right," the proud father replied. "So, where's his US passport? He can't go through immigration without his passport." The little red book meant nothing. Without that little blue book, the BBC baby could not leave the country. The whole family had to go back to DC, miss their flight and wait three days to get the vital document.
The philosophy behind the immigration officer's position was as follows: American citizens are more important than anyone else; these Brits are trying to take an American citizen out of the country without his passport, meaning that he might not be able to exercise his rights as an American citizen outside the US. In refusing the child exit, the officer was protecting his citizen's rights.
As we pulled up outside the strangely beautiful, curved-roof terminal building at Dulles, I wondered if we were about to suffer the same fate. As it was, Julius's passport got only the most cursory of glances and we were waved through. When, a few weeks later, we went to get his American passport from the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, we did get a firm ticking-off along the lines of having committed some kind of felony by ripping him from his native country with invalid documentation.
Citizenship means an awful lot to Americans, at least in theory. American police officers may beat up American citizens as frequently and as enthusiastically as they do illegal immigrants. The FBI might tap their phones with reckless abandon. But put them up against non-Americans, and the US citizens' rights triumph every time. There are no Americans behind the wire in Guantanamo Bay.
For the ancient Romans, Romanitas was everything. The stringency with which America has insisted on its right to uphold Americanitas wherever it might roam is equally powerful and it has had some odd side effects. In the Second World War, the US government insisted that the million or more GIs who passed through Britain should be subject solely to American military justice. This led to the anomaly of three men, all black, being hanged for rape in Shepton Mallet prison, Somerset, even though rape was not a capital crime in Britain.
Nothing is more important in the eyes of the American law than upholding the rights of the American citizen. It is a republic made up of citizens. It may offer lip service to international organisations and treaties: both the League of Nations and the United Nations were the creatures of idealistic American presidents (Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt respectively). But the rights of the individual American above any foreign law or power have a conceptual importance that we in Britain find very difficult to comprehend.
Can the subjects of a monarch, however much that monarchy is hidebound by constitutional law, ever have quite as much of a sense of common purpose, or even ownership, in dealings with their state as do the citizens of a republic? I do not think so.
Yet the fact that American law so zealously protects its citizenry against affront is exactly why we should not let the NatWest Three be extradited to Houston. It may well, as Joshua Rozenberg pointed out last week, cause diplomatic repercussions if the Home Secretary were simply to refuse to extradite the three on the grounds that we were not sure that it was just. But Americans would understand.
The stumbling block for realisation of the 2003 extradition treaty between the two countries is the US Senate, as pragmatic and hard-headed a body as you would find anywhere in the world, and it would know precisely what the reasoning behind such a volte-face would be. The White House might rail and scream for a while but, behind closed doors, it would see that some matters rise above the short-term needs of international treaties (especially when US lawyers know full well that this was not the kind of crime for which these extraordinary arrangements were dreamed up).
And the American people, those of them who would even bother to express an opinion, could be persuaded to step into the shoes of those three men and their families and say, yes, the Brits do have a right to put their own people first.
From top to bottom, America would understand if we felt there was something fundamentally wrong in sending these men into a foreign jurisdiction, to stand before a jury that could have a far less neutral set of preconceptions about their dealings with Enron than they would meet in a British courtroom. Americans might feel temporarily shunned by their most intimate international friend, but they would respect us in the morning.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/global/main. ... p_12072006

I read it as a compliment to the U.S. and that Britain should treat it's own citizens with the same fervor. Unfortunately, I think he doesn't see that American citizenship has been cheapened of late. It now appears that the President and Congress believe that American citizenship is for sale at a price. That's why they want to give illegal aliens a shot at U.S. citizenship.

I read it as a compliment to the U.S. and that Britain should treat it's own citizens with the same fervor.

Well, when I first started reading it sounded like that to me too. But the more of it I read, I felt he was insulting us. They talk like no matter what happens, if those 3 come here for trial (Not to mention they were part of the Enron gang....those who ripped off a heck of a lot of Americans) we will see to it they will never see their homeland again. The CEO's over here didn't get away with stealing from us...........WHY SHOULD THEY, just because they happen to live in Europe?
They deserve to pay the piper too, just like Enron's CEO's did here.
We don't need to "Forgive them" because they are from there. Why should we allow them to stay there and live high off the hog on money they stole from us?